Back in 2007 I started a free Blogspot web site in the gaming space. Within 6 months, via Google Adsense (and a couple other rev sources) it was bring in $3,800 a month.

A year later the site was receiving 110,000 uniques, 1.5 million page views and over $10,000 a month (with multiple rev sources). This juggernaut was a simple blog of mostly daily posts about games and in some cases those blog posts were simple reposts from the game’s own blog.

Impressed with what I had done, or more accurately, shocked at what had happened to me. I mentioned this at a startup conference to someone.

But what was I told by a certain successful startup guy?

“That’s not a startup. That’s just a website.”

Sure, falling bass-ackwards into a revenue stream does not make a startup a startup. Tons of unique visitors and page impressions don’t either.

So what does?

Would anyone consider the front page of this site, Crranky.com a startup? It’s a simple idea simply executed by me, a non-techical guy with no programming help. No?

Moving on from this I’ve attempted a “real” startup this time. Now with a little cash in my pocket, hiring a programmer, spending a year in development of a profile-type platform for tweens and teens. Think of it as About.me for virtual world profiles, called Funhouse.

Several thousand dollars poorer, no revenue and about 6,000 members later can I now consider myself a start up guy? A real startup guy? What about a serial entrepreneur?

My list goes on but I’ll spare you the clicks. I haven’t had the kind of “startup success” I did back when I had a free website, ad revenue and lots of traffic.

If the definition of startup is (and from what I read on Hacker News at times seems to be) being broke taking a great idea to a well executed functional MVP with the hope of someday being acquired, then no thanks.

I’ll take just a big revenue generating “website” any day.

Why? Because I am not interested in making a dent in the universe, at least right now.